Rudrapatnam Shamashastry

One hundred years ago, an obscure librarian created what in scholarly terms was a sensation. 1909 was the year in which the first near complete text of Kautilya’s Arthashastra was published. Four years earlier, Rudrapatnam Shamashastry had discovered the palm leaf manuscript that would define his legacy. But while he recognised the significance of the text, even he could not have anticipated the revolution in Indian self-image his discovery would bring about. The text became a focal point with which to contest every cliché that had been used to define India...

The text itself is not an easy read. It is like the planning commission, national security council, administrative reforms commission all thrown into one, peppered with insights from moral psychology and encased by a layer of precise theoretical vocabulary that we can barely reconstruct. Its strength is the lapidary insight, not the extended argument.